Destiny Saxon, brewmaster at American Flatbread in Burlington, holds the fruits of her labor. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

Zero Gravity Craft Brewery is part of the American Flatbread restaurant in Burlington / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

“We’re 21 years old,” Laura Streets said. “We’re finally legal!” Streets is the producer of the Vermont Brewers Festival, in its 21st year. The sold-out event will be held today and Saturday at the Burlington Waterfront. Tickets to the festival sold out in 34 hours, Streets said. There were 8,400 tickets sold. About 35 percent of the people who are attending the festival come from out of state or Canada, according to Streets. The quality of craft beer brewed in Vermont is a “key component” to the interest in the festival, Streets said. “The demographic is very educated about craft beer,” she said. “It’s a destination crowd. They travel to wherever there’s good beer.”

Destiny Saxon, brewmaster at American Flatbread in Burlington, stands in the brewery in the back of the restaurant. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

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Destiny Saxon has lost track of the number of times she called Paul Sayler or stopped by to ask him about working at Zero Gravity, the brewery at American Flatbread restaurant in Burlington. But she’s sure the number of inquiries doesn’t trail 14 by much.

And the No. 14 played a big role in bringing Saxon in from the cold and into the heat of the tanks.

Into the tanks, literally.

Fourteen is the number of dirty, old, used beer tanks that arrived at Flatbread one night in 2005 on a flatbed truck.

Sayler called Saxon to ask if she’d come in and help clean the 350-gallon tanks.

This early-morning operation involved caustic cleansers and climbing into the tanks through a kind of manhole cover or, in Saxon’s case, woman-hole cover.

“She helped me, and I saw her impressive work ethic,” said Sayler, 51, co-owner of American Flatbread and in charge of the beer operation. “It’s grueling and challenging. After that, she would come in to apprentice, volunteer her labor. Destiny did what most of us do who manage to get a brewer’s job: persevere. So many brewers have found their ways into breweries by pestering. It’s a key strategy.”

Saxon, 35, first contacted Sayler in July 2004 and landed the cleaning job in March 2005. She made her “final plug” one Friday night when she ate pizza at the restaurant and saw Sayler through the window, brewing beer.

“If it’s your only chance to get in the door, you’ll come in at 2 in the morning,” Saxon said.

At the time, she was working in an environmental lab in Williston and making home brew “like crazy.” With each batch, her interest grew. She wanted to learn more, in a professional setting.

“I feel like this place was kind of a pioneer for the explosion of beer lovers in Vermont,” Saxon said the other day at the Flatbread bar.

These days, if you peek through the windows near the bar to the brewery below, you will see Saxon. Until last week, she was the only brewer you’d see at Zero Gravity. Saxon is one of a very few professional women brewers in Vermont. (Switchback’s Gretchen Langfeldt, plant engineer, is a former Switchback brewer who says she fell into the job through “dumb luck.”)

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She, too, used persistence to land her job, calling Switchback numerous times after graduating from Notre Dame with a degree in mechanical engineering. The part-time job Langfeldt sought would hold her over until she found a “real engineering job,” Langfeldt said. Instead, it became her career.

“I did aerospace internships in college,” Langfeldt, 31, said. “It’s all I knew up to that point. And I knew I liked beer.”

Although an ancient poem was written about the Sumerian goddess of beer, Ninkasi (“You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweet wort”), contemporary brewers are primarily men.

Saxon said she knows about an early history of women brewers, but wasn’t thinking about gender when she became interested in brewing. “Most of the people I’ve worked with are men and they’ve all been very helpful for my career,” she said. “Most women who are in the industry tend to be not on the brewing side, but more on lab or packaging or sales.”

For Saxon, the appeal of brewing was discovering that beer was something she could make herself. “That sounded really cool to me,” she said. “I like learning how to do things. I feel like women or men who are interested in learning how to do artisanal crafts would be interested in brewing. You’re creating something.”

At Zero Gravity, Saxon worked alone for almost five years until last week, when Zero Gravity added an intern and a second brewer. Justin McCarthy, the brewer, joined Zero Gravity after a decade at Magic Hat, where he worked his way up from the bottling line to head brewer.

“It’s safe to say it’s a male-dominated industry,” McCarthy said. “(But) as craft beer explodes, you see more and more women in the brewhouse. It was just a man’s world. With an influx of smaller brewers, it opens things up.”

Craft brewers and their fans will be gathering in Burlington this weekend for the (sold-out) Vermont Brewers Festival, which starts today at the Burlington Waterfront.

“It’s our busiest week,” Saxon said. “People are coming from all over to check out the breweries. We get a lot of attention because of the food.”

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In the weeks before the festival, Saxon brews a batch of TLA — the house IPA — every three weeks. That’s 2,800 pints in three weeks.

“Most people bring something special to the festival,” she said. “This is a great time for us to actually hang out with other brewers. We’re all too busy to see each other, especially in the summertime.”

Zero Gravity will bring five kinds of beer to the festival. Flatbread restaurant and bar will also have special beers on tap, timed for the festival and the beer aficionados it brings to town.

“We make sure that we have as much special stuff as possible,” Sayler said. “We’re all hangouts this weekend — us, Vermont Pub and Brewery, Farmhouse. That’s our penchant. We want people to come and hang out and talk about beer.”

Among the special beers that will be available at the bar are a tribute beer for the late Greg Noonan of Vermont Pub and Brewery, who was a guru in Vermont brewing. The beer is brewed at Zero Gravity every year for Noonan’s birthday, and a keg or two is saved for the festival. Saxon also made a 3.2 beer, a low-alcohol sour German ale called Burln’wol (Berlin Wall), a collaboration with Wolaver’s.

“People go crazy for that kind of beer,” she said.

Saxon is a 1996 graduate of Essex High School who wonders what her teachers will think of a former student working 50 hours a week (or more) brewing beer. Teachers — and others — should know that Saxon, a geology major at Keene State, is putting multiple disciplines to use crafting beer.

There is the chemistry, which involves steeping, boiling and fermenting. There is a physical aspect, which requires hauling 50-pound bags of grain and “graining out” the tanks: Using a hoe to move spent grain into garbage pails and lugging them to the street, where Tamarack Hollow Farm collects them for pig feed. There’s concentration and repetition, with a concern for safety and caution: A valve turned the wrong way or a misconnected hose can mean boiling water spewing in the wrong direction.

Finally, there is the artistry that is crucial to practicing any craft. This is perhaps the most important component of brewing and the hardest to pin down: conceiving ideas, unifying flavors, overseeing aging to that peak moment.

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“Getting to brew is the fun part,” she said. “And the creative part.”

A key to Zero Gravity is a commitment to aging time, with enough tanks to properly age a variety of styles, Sayler said. The changing menu includes a hops-less beer, or gruit, brewed with herbs grown at Arethusa Farm in the Intervale; a beer made with berries from Adam’s Berry Farm; and a “saison” or seasonal beer flavored with green and red peppercorns. A special seasonal beer has deep roots in beer-making traditions and was originally brewed for seasonal workers in Belgium, Saxon said.

Delicate aromatics, like berries, maple syrup or the “saison” peppercorns, are added at the end of the boil, Saxon said.

“Always the goal is to have flavor components be right at the threshold,” Sayler said. “So they fade in and out; the flavors are very subtle.”

Zero Gravity’s seasonal beer is a wonderful summer beer, original and refreshing with a flavor that reveals itself sip by sip.

For Sayler, it delivers a sensation similar to that of gazing at Pleiades. “If you focus on Pleiades, one star flickers in and out,” he said. “If you step back from the whole constellation, it’s a wonderful glow.”

For all her pestering of Sayler, including coming by with samples of her home brew, Saxon’s first beer job was at Otter Creek. She worked at the Middlebury brewery three years, in the lab and filtering beer, helping to produce five batches of beer a day, Saxon said. (By comparison, Zero Gravity produces two batches a week.)

“Finally, American Flatbread got to a place where it was a little too much for Paul,” she said. “I got lucky. I felt like, when I was home-brewing, there were a lot of brewers in Vermont and I could get a job. I’m grateful Paul let me in.”

Saxon learned more about her craft in Chicago at the Siebel Institute of Technology. She was given a scholarship to the school, founded in 1872 and the oldest brewing school in the country.

Zero Gravity, which makes all the beer on the Flatbread menu, produced 900 barrels of beer last year (a barrel is 31 gallons). Production is expected to increase to 1,200 barrels this year, according to Sayler. The brewery has a growing interest in and focus on pairing beer with quality local foods. It plans to expand sales to area restaurants, working with the eateries to create complementary pairings, Sayler said.

Saxon is excited about brewing more beer and, after five years as mostly a soloist, working with another brewer. Brewers tend to do things their own way, she and Sayler said. The weekend festival is a chance to celebrate their shared endeavor.

“There’s a great esprit de corps among craftspeople,” Sayler said. “It’s a very satisfying group to be part of.”